Tony Abbott and Barack Obama during the President's visit to Australia in 2011. Photo: Getty Images

As foreign affairs officials in Canberra planned Tony Abbott's visit to Washington next week, another Australian was already here, quietly checking the vital signs of Australia's most important alliance.

And she found some views that might startle the PM's team. Hayley Channer was sent to the US capital by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, where her boss, Peter Jennings, is leading the drafting of Australia's next defence White Paper.

Her task in Washington, not yet finished, has been to interview US experts - including State Department officials, think tank analysts and academics - on how they see the bilateral relationship.

Australia should "think about what it wants to be when it grows up", one of the experts suggested in an off-record interview. "Australia seems scared of its own shadow," said another.

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Abbott's first visit to the US capital as leader could not come at a more critical time for the alliance. The relationship is as robust and close as ever, but it is facing its first significant test of recent years, says the former US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell.

A region of marked stability has suddenly become one of rapidly rising tensions, prompted not only by China's increasingly bellicose maritime claims - particularly those affecting Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam - but by the threat of another nuclear test by North Korea.

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The increasingly terse language between Washington and Beijing deteriorated in Singapore last week at the Asian defence ministers' forum known as the Shangri-La Dialogue.

Lieutenant-General Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of the People's Liberation Army's General Staff, responded that Hagel's speech was "full of hegemony, full of words of threat and intimidation".

To many, the tensions at the talks confirmed that Washington's hope of peacefully accommodating China's economic rise while retaining its own Indo-Pacific hegemony is marked by magical thinking.

However, that is what the US is seeking to achieve, and Australia - a stable, friendly middle power that geographically straddles both oceans and has close ties with rising regional players - is central to the strategy.

The problem facing both Abbott and Barack Obama as they prepare to meet this challenge is not just that China has its own plans, but its own unruly domestic politics.

In Washington, the Obama administration's strategic "rebalance" to Asia is suffering criticism by political opponents and analysts, who say it does not exist outside White House and State Department rhetoric.

In turn, that criticism is causing disquiet among key Asian allies. This was not helped when Obama failed to even mention the pivot to Asia during a key foreign policy speech at the West Point military academy last week.

In fact the rebalance is real, even if the US has been, as Kurt Campbell once conceded to New Yorker magazine, "on a little bit of a Middle Eastern detour". Washington's foreign policy establishment remains convinced that despite the need to focus on the Middle East and more recently Russia and Ukraine, this will be an Asian century.

But even the rebalance's champions concede the administration has failed to explain this properly to the US public.

Similarly neither Obama nor Abbott - nor the previous Australian Labor government - has been able to quell popular disquiet about the economic cement of the rebalance, the free trade agreement under negotiation known as the Trans Pacific Partnership.

With Washington's military budget tightening, the US has been demanding its European and Asian allies shoulder more of their own defence burden. The Obama administration was shocked by the defence budget cuts under the Labor government, and clearly hopes to see increases under Abbott.

US analysts would like to see Australia's northern military bases extended and improved for American use, as well as increased interoperability with US forces and those of other key allies, especially Japan and South Korea.

Some would like to see Australia take a more forceful diplomatic position against China's maritime claims.

Aside from these concrete concerns, there is the open question of whether Obama and Abbott will be able to forge a close personal relationship.

The two are cut from significantly different political cloth, and some of the Australian leader's previous comments about the US President were widely reported here and cannot have escaped his notice.

During the election campaign, Abbott gave an interview to Mary Kissell, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board - the Praetorian Guard of conservative American thought - in which he called Obama '"the most left-of-centre government [sic] in at least half a century". That position might be defensible, but coming from Abbott as prime minister-in-waiting it was neither complimentary nor politic.

Either way, Abbott, a man known for simplifying his message, might enjoy how Obama recently articulated the conceptual framework underpinning his foreign policy. Frustrated at what he saw as misdirected criticism, the President broke it down for the journalists gathered on Air Force One during his recent visit to Asia in terms he hoped they might understand: "Don't do stupid shit."